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Cloud Governance Challenges and Best Practices

Navdeep Singh Gill | 19 April 2023

Cloud Governance Challenges and Best Practices

What is Cloud Governance?

It is a set of rules. It applies specific policies or principles to the use of computing services. This model aims to secure applications and data even if located distantly. The best solutions include People, Processes, and Technology. It basically refers to the decision-making processes, criteria, and policies involved in the planning, architecture, acquisition, deployment, operation, architecture, acquisition, implementation, operation, and management of a Cloud computing capability. Its best practices help to optimize the organization's:
  • Operations: Doing it efficiently
  • Risk and compliance: Doing it securely
  • Financial: Doing more with less

Why it is Important?

The below-mentioned points are the importance of Cloud Governance

Make it easier to manage resources

Cloud service providers like AWS ( Amazon Web Services Solutions) and many others are now advising customers to move multiple-tenant workloads residing in a single account or subscription into different accounts. Using various accounts will manage distinct workloads, one of the best practices today to deliver precise access, control, and cost management. Moreover, using its best practices limits an issue's security and financial blast radius. Using the correct Governance Model of Cloud Services helps organize the volume of accounts most organizations need and provide visibility around key online activities and trends.

Helps curb shadow IT

Risk and spending increase when you do not understand what systems are in use or where corporate data resides. Whenever a delay occurs in getting access to resources, employees turn to shadow IT. It is helpful as it places the required framework to request and access resources quickly. It gives team members access to the breadth of allowed resources among compliance and budget constraints.

Reduces labor

Instead of using spreadsheets or any other similar manual processes that track accounts, cost, and compliance, the other way is to set guardrails at the appropriate point in your organizational hierarchy: these guardrails control access, budget, and policy of the required projects. In addition to this, complete solutions offer enforcement actions that allow you to do away with necessary follow-up actions after receiving an alert. Following best practices save time and effort as it prevents non-compliant activities and budget overruns.
Due to time pressure, do not shortened Cloud Governance services test phase before the go-live as it may become a costly mistake for your business. Source, Four Lessons Learned From Cloud Infrastructure Adopters

What is the Governance Policy?

Governance policies contain a set of protocols of how things should be regulated on it. So, its policies should be created and regularly reviewed by business executives, managers, and IT experts.

The Cloud Governance policy must include the following:

  • Standards for the design of infrastructure
  • Monitoring of infrastructure and application
  • Security Policy
  • Programming standards
  • Backup recovery services

Certain sensitive information and data should be restricted to all unauthorized users. Therefore, one should use proper authentication and permission level checks.

A Cloud Governance Model should be a proper roadmap for your cloud consumption, how you plan a new deployment policy, how you will switch your application from one provider to another, what will be the deployment process, and who will evaluate them.

This plan operates over four levels, listed below:-

  • Infrastructure or virtualization platform
  • Operating systems
  • Platform/application
  • Business/user activity on that platform

A firm policy will help you run the business well; otherwise, it will result in security loopholes, reduced performance, and permanent data loss. This is why choosing the best solutions and following best practices are essential


An approach to developing, building, and shipping applications that take advantage of modern Cloud computing services Click to explore our, Guide to Secure Cloud Native Applications

Top 6 Governance Principles

Six governance principles for its solutions are the basis for effective governance. Every organization varies in its governance necessities. Thus, it should be necessary to amend the policies listed below to match your specific circumstances.

Financial management

This point consists of budget policies and cost trend policies. Both policies are closely related as long as you need to be aware of cost trend influencers to determine whether budgets will meet or need to adjust them.

Cost Optimization

A cost optimization policy reduces cost by keeping you up-to-date with opportunities to take advantage of committed use discounts and modifying you to occasions when committed use discounts are not being utilized fully.

Operational Governance

The operational governance principle contains system testing, and two cost-cutting measures - identifying and terminating unused ZOMBIE assets and scheduling stop/start time for non-production instances used in the development, software testing, staging, and QA.

Performance Management

A better model for governing data relates to optimizing assets for their workloads. It consists of downgrading assets due to initial over-provisioning or a fall in demand - or upgrading them as demand increases. Its best practices also include ensuring that the stored data is in the most cost-effective location.

Asset & Configuration Management

Asset and configuration management consists of everything from consistent tagging for cost allocation to identifying non-conforming assets, like those that exceed the permitted capacity, are incompatible with existing assets, or those that launched outside a U.S. region.

Security & Incident Management

Best solutions or services cover multiple cloud security components and may need to be subdivided into smaller principles to address issues. For example, Encryption, Access controls, Security groups, Audit trails, Application access rules.
Threat intelligence provides organizations with early warning of attacks and enables security teams to respond quickly and effectively. Click here to know, How to Integrate Threat Intelligence for Security & Incident Response?

What are the Challenges?

Some of the challenges are below mentioned:-

Performance Management

When any business uses cloud services, it is the service provider's responsibility to supply proper services and enhance performance. If the service provider goes down, the client's performance using the services will also decrease. To avoid such conditions, a proper Governance Cloud Model, a set of policies, and choosing one of the best solutions can be helpful.

Governance/Control

A proper set of policies and procedures helps to support your organizational strategies and business goals. It will enhance the business and reduce the company's operational cost.

Cost Management

Organizations using cloud services will be in profit as it is a very cost-effective approach. The policies are designed in such a way that, if followed, will result in high profit. A properly considered Cloud Governance Model optimizes cost by conducting better financial analytics and automating policies or keeping management reporting practices will help provide cost management.

Security Issues

The security of the data is also one of the major concerns. It is so because the security lope holes can be avoided by using some strict rules, Cloud Governance best practices, and policies. A Governance Model should build proper authentication policies to protect the information's confidentiality, integrity, and availability. As there are many security bug cases in the cloud service providers like AWS are aware of a security issue (CVE-2019-11246) in the Kubernetes kubectl tool that can allow a malicious container to replace or create files on a user's workstation.

What are the Best Tools?

The below listed are the best Cloud Security Governance Tools:

  1. SpectralOps
  2. Cisco Cloudlock
  3. Bitglass
  4. Cato Networks | Cato SASE
  5. Fugue
  6. Perimeter 81
  7. Illumio Core

Java vs Kotlin
Our solutions cater to diverse industries with a focus on serving ever-changing marketing needs. Click here to learn XenonStack's Cloud Security Strategy for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

What is the best Approach?

Its best practices vary for each business as per its objectives and level of the cloud journey. Also, thousands of Cloud Governance solutions providers are available in the online marketplace today. One needs to analyze the business assets and performance and then build accordingly. Therefore, the policies are easily governed with the total visibility of business resources.

Conclusion

Adopting the Cloud Governance Strategy effectively starts with defining the team who will handle governance and audit-related tasks, understanding how security policies will be impacting its adoption roadmap, and establishing the best practices for building its framework.